


On the Head of a Pin

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, angels and fish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fish grow up and the angels remain the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Head of a Pin

Sometimes, when Anael spreads herself across the waters, she finds fish that are not fish. Their legs gone, their jaws unhinged, breathing apparatuses tinkered with so that they slowly suffocate.

Father works in mysterious ways.

It is the nature of the fish to die, so Anael cups their essence within herself and remembers.

When the fish are no longer fish, when there is a glimmering of what the angels call a soul, their bodies are no longer mutilated.

Anael finds the fish walking, standing upright with their four competent limbs, but their soul is marred, twisted with shadows that should not be, and when they speak, their words hang in the air, cold like ice, steaming under summer suns, crackling under winter nights.

Nature could not touch the souls. The souls are like the angels. Untouchable, shrouded in flesh and blood to keep them warm so that they will not wither and die.

The souls are not like the angels. Fragments of something other, of a possibility of greatness, a portent of opportunity whereas grace burns steady, never flickering, never wavering, always there, fires on a mountaintop, constellations in the sky scrawling across the continuum of space and time:  _god is here and he will never forsake you_.

With the souls, the fish are both immortal and mortal—a paradox that Anael struggles to understand. They are vast and limited and Anael wonders if limitation is swallowed whole by a fish until the fish dies and she emerges whole, intact, as bright as before while the fish flops helplessly on the shore, without a soul to cup inside, without a soul to become immortal.

Anael wonders how the fish can walk on land but not be one with the earth, how they can speak to each other but their breaths remain unfused, crushing and stimulating separate molecules, how they can come together but still not be two masses inhabiting the same space as the angels can.

Anael doesn’t think much about the period that comes next, the time when Lucifer was cast down, burning, a meteor crashing through atmosphere and earth, and Lilith following after—the first fish whose soul was unrecognizable, who was utterly alien, who was no longer a fish but something else, a corruption.

The other angels say that Father wants the angels to spurn these fish who are no longer fish, but Anael remembers—she remembers when they were fish, when their souls were pure, when they burned brighter than a star, and how she would rather gather them to herself, all those corrupted souls, and whisper, breathe away the pollution like the wind blows pollen from the apple blossoms, but the angels say Father shakes his head no. They say he hardens their being, edges their grace with a fine-honed blade, and sorts them into garrisons, stationed on earth, among the fish but never touching as Lucifer and his progeny twist more fish into their likeness.

Lucifer steps on the fish—the only angel who has touched their fish-souls, and he touches and he touches and he touches and Anael reaches after the fish, reaching and reaching and reaching but never touching, never saving, never holding.

Instead of helping them, Father wants them to fight, and then he wants them to watch, and do nothing as Lucifer rages below, smoke and ash polluting the sky and the earth with a stain so deep and strong that no rains could ever wash it away.

Castiel watches with her.

She saysas the fish sometimes hurt each other, sometimes kill each other, sometimes help each other as the angels watch,  _I don’t think the fish have ever truly left the ocean_.

Castiel shifts towards her without disturbing the molecules of air and earth surrounding them.

 _You can see it in their eyes—always wet, like they’re always weeping even when they’re not overflowing with the saltwater just lurking beneath their surface. And they are made of water, like they carry the sea within them always, and it’s not until they’re dead and gone, skin crumbling and bones moldering back into the earth, that they truly leave the sea._

Castiel turns back, leaning a little forward, trying to see inside their eyes, to find the ocean inside their bodies as shores of dust.

Anael wonders what it must be like to carry the weight of the ocean inside as they walk the land on two legs, how heavy it must feel, and cannot imagine it. 


End file.
